A different kind of company from most of the others on this site, in that its records were intended to instruct not to entertain. The Linguaphone Institute is reported to have been set up in 1901, by translator and teacher Jacques Roston, in order to provide people with language courses that could be studied at home. They proved immensely popular and the firm is still in business. Recordings have always been an important part of Linguaphone courses, and have come in every popular format, from the initial wax cylinders to the digital downloads of today. There were many records to each course: the German singles shown above were two of a set of sixteen. Numbering seems to have consisted of the initials of the language plus a number in the 00s. Each side of a single had its own number, the first record in the German set being GER-60 / GER-61. The style of the matrix numbers of the dark-blue-labelled record suggests that Decca did the metalwork, and that of the numbers of mid-blue record in the 'Linguaphone Institute' sleeve indicates that it was cut by Pye, but Linguaphone had its own presses and they were capable of producing many tens of thousands of singles per week, which enabled it to do a lot of contract pressings for companies both major and minor in addition to manufacturing its own records - see the bottom of the 'Matrix Numbers And Other Run-Off Markings' page. There are generally no dates on the labels of the company's own records; presumably they were pressed and re-pressed throughout the vinyl era. However, some courses, with 7" records to accompany them, first saw the light of day in the 1970s - singles accompanying a Greek course had '1975' on their labels (2) and a German course by Ingrid K. J. Williams (and others) was published in 1971, to give two examples - and thus the label qualifies for this site.
Copyright 2010 Robert Lyons.